Muhammad Umar

“[D]emocracy can be in tension with itself: efforts to increase levels of democratic participation and transparency can actually decrease the democratic representativeness of the system as a whole. The great mass of individuals living in a democracy are not able by background or temperament to make complex public policy decisions, and when they are asked to do so repeatedly the process is often taken over by well-organized interest groups that can manipulate the process to serve their narrow purposes. Excessive transparency can undermine deliberation.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

“The land remembers. Even if we forget, the soil stores every cut, every kindness.”
― Lawrence Nault

“The more humans fill the world, the more we empty it.”
― Carl Safina, Becoming Wild: How Animals Learn Who They Are

“From the vantage point of people living in advanced societies today, most past humans faced almost unimaginable hardships. Violence, disease, and starvation, which still bedevil the lives of the unfortunates living in some of the world’s poorest countries, were compounded by deep and universal ignorance.”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet